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Google Code-in 2011-2012 wraps up

Google has announced that its 2011-2012 Google Code-in program has now concluded. Over the course of eight weeks, more than 540 high school students participated in the contest, which had them complete various tasks for 18 open source projects, including the GNOME and KDE projects, as well as openSUSE, FreeBSD and Perl.

In a blog post, GNOME developer André Klapper says that out of the 136 tasks provided by the GNOME community, 124 were successfully completed by participating students. GNOME project tasks included code improvements to the Cheese application for taking pictures, GNOME Games, and the Vino desktop sharing server, as well as creating and updating documentation and translations.

The Google Code-in contest, open to pre-university students aged 13 to 17 from around the world, is designed to introduce them to open source software development. This is done by having them complete small tasks like writing or refactoring code, and working on user interface design, translations, documentation and testing. Each of these tasks had a difficulty level rating and an associated number of points assigned to it. Those with the most points accumulated through the contest will win a trip to Google's Mountain View, California campus in June for themselves and a parent or legal guardian.